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Trout, Pickled

Pickled trout prepared with onions, butter, turnip, herbs, vinegar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Trout, Pickled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the trout

  1. Remove the skin and bones from the trout and cut the flesh into neat pieces.

  2. Place the trout pieces in a deep dish.

Make the pickling liquor

  1. In a saucepan, combine the minced onions, butter, chopped turnip, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, salt, and pepper.

  2. Cook the mixture over low heat for 5 minutes.

  3. Add the vinegar and boiling water to the saucepan and bring to a boil.

  4. Let the mixture boil for 20 minutes, then pour it over the trout.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,352 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Trout
Forms the main body of the dish, flaking into pieces that absorb the pickling liquor.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic depth to the pickling liquor as they cook down.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded mouthfeel to the cooked onion and turnip base.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that preserves the fish and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.

The step that matters

Boiling the vinegar mixture for 20 minutes. Boiling the vinegar with the aromatics extracts their flavour and drives off harsh sharpness, so the liquor is balanced before it reaches the fish. Pouring it on while still hot also helps it penetrate the trout evenly.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, turnip, parsley, thyme, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, turnip, parsley, thyme, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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